Dear Devil:

Ola, from Earth. Thank you so much for your last letter; and hope you are feeling better.

I have a question for you – why is there evil in the world?

Sincerely,

Nikki.

Dear Little Girl:

So good to hear from you again. I do enjoy our little chats. Thank you, I am feeling much better now that I am speaking to you. Colon – dash – close parentheses. (Smiley)

Today’s question: “Why is there evil in the world?”

Yawn. Bo-ring.

You seem so bright, Little Girl, I wonder why you would even bother with this one. I can’t even dignify it with an answer.

Or maybe I can. Have I told you about my latest triumph? It’s called Coke Zero.

This is brilliant.

What IS Coca Cola? Sugar and calories with a bit of caramel flavouring. Hard to argue with the success of that. But in your culture’s quest for the new, someone decided it wasn’t good enough. So they took the sugar and calories and flavour OUT of the thing you love, and replaced them with this thing called Aspartame, and they have added this other thing called Cancer. Blech. Not only that, but Aspartame promises to help you lose weight when it in fact does quite the opposite. It makes you hungry, so that you consume more than you would have otherwise.

So the marketers have taken the thing you love and removed what you love about it and they tell you will you like it MORE. And they have made no bones about it. They are TELLING you out and out that this is NOTHING. It’s empty. Hollow. Meaningless. It’s called Coke ZERO after all. And people buy it. They purchase it, but what’s more, they believe in it.

Isn’t that utterly, beautifully, perverse? There is the long answer. The short answer is that there is evil in the world because people believe in it.

Cheers my lovely,

The Devil.